384 THE PAINTED SNIPE. 
birds, and three or four (never more) young ones. But I have 
occasionally seen a dozen or more birds, all apparently adults, in 
the same patch of cover ; and since Captain Butler drew attention 
to the matter, I have repeatedly seen similar parties, consisting 
entirely of young birds of both sexes, all of course in the 
plumage of the male, though in some few of the females signs 
of the coming adult plumage were appearing. 
Painted Snipe, as a rule, lie close and require some hustling 
to flush them, at least, if met with in the good cover 
they chiefly affect. Sometimes you may find them in thin 
stuff, such as satisfies the Common Snipe, and then I have 
known them rise on your approaching within twenty yards. 
But, as a rule, itis only when you begin to trample through the 
patch in which they are for the time living that they rise, and 
I have found them occasionally quite as hard to put up as any 
Jack. They seem very tame or stupid birds. You may flush 
them week after week out of the same patch in your quest for 
Pintails or other snipe, but so long as the spot continues to their 
liking, they steadily cling to it; and even if, as of late years in 
view to settling certain questions to be discussed further on 
I have had to do, you shoot several of the party, following them 
about to effect this, the remainder are “all there” the next week 
just as if a gun had never been fired. 
They rise silently according to my experience, but I am told 
that occasionally (I presume during the breeding season) the 
females utter their characteristic low note when suddenly 
flushed. The flight is comparatively slow, laboured, and with 
irregular flappings, and a good deal resembles that of 
some of the Rails, especially in the way they sometimes 
hang their legs. They fly low, and soon drop again into 
cover; but if fired at and missed, or possibly just touched 
with a grain or two of shot, they sometimes give a little 
shoot- into the air, and put on a spurt, carrying them 
double the distance they usually go. If the patch into which 
they drop is small, you will find them much where they 
dropped, for in daylight they rarely cross the open, even when 
undisturbed, and never, I think, when alarmed; but if fortune 
favours them, and they reach a good bed of rushes, they will 
often make tracks through this in a regular Rail-like fashion, and 
you may find them fifty yards or more further on. 
I said that in the daytime they rarely cross the open, but on 
one occasion, when lying up in a bed of bulrushes trying to 
circumvent an Osprey that was hunting about, I saw three 
running about on a tiny patch of short, close, moist turf just 
outside the rushes, and not twenty yards from where I was, and 
picking up something rapidly from the ground. After watch- 
ing them for several minutes, I madea slight clicking sound, 
and they instantly sneaked into the cover with lowered heads. 
In this action, and in their mode of moving about, they remind- 
